Core concepts
The nouns you will meet everywhere in Pad, and how they fit together.
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Organization | Your company's account: the tenant and billing boundary. Everyone signs in to one, and everything below belongs to it. |
| Pad | A context container: one Library tree, its skills, and one memory pool, for a set of members. Every member has a personal pad of their own; teams share pads. |
| Chat | A conversation with a model. Private to you until you share it, and scoped to the pads and connections you turn on as its sources. |
| Group | A set of people that mirrors your org chart. Grant a group a pad or a connection and every member has it. |
| Connection | A tool your organization connected once (a CRM, a calendar, a project tracker, an MCP server, or a website the chat's browser signs in to) and shared with the groups and people who need it. |
| Document | A page, file, or folder in a pad's Library. |
| Skill | A reusable playbook that teaches the model to do a task your way, run with a slash in any chat. |
| Memory | Facts Pad learns from your chats, kept for you, for each pad, and for the organization. |
| Model | One of the frontier models Pad offers, picked per chat. |
How they fit together
A chat is where work happens. It reaches exactly the sources it names: the pads that lend it documents, skills, and memory, and the connections that lend it tools. Nothing runs inside a pad; a pad is what a team knows, and a chat is what a team does with it.
Access follows the org chart. Sharing content means pad membership, sharing a tool means a connection grant, and sharing a conversation means an invitation or a link. Groups make the first two bulk operations, so adding someone to a group hands them every pad and tool the group holds.
Privacy is the default. Your personal pad has exactly one member, your chats are yours until you invite someone, and a tool only ever acts under a named grant. When a chat is shared, its sources are always visible in the header, so a transcript can only ever contain content from sources every reader can see named.